Kitten Pile
by summerlinde
Summary: Scarf is about to go to bed when the rest of the crew joins him on deck to get away from The Pirate with an Accordion, who won't stop snoring. One-shot fluff. Starts off Scarf/Curvaceous.


Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate turned inevitably into a thousand-pound drooling heat factory about a minute and 37 seconds before she fell asleep on his shoulder, but Pirate With a Scarf could never quite bring himself to mind, especially not at times like this, when they were curled up beside each other on the deck, near the ship's wheel, and she'd left her beard on in case the others showed up. It caught most of the drool, keeping his shoulder at least a little drier, though it did nothing to stop her putting off prodigious amounts of heat in her sleep, and _nothing _seemed to explain how such a small and (if you ignored the hips) slender person could suddenly seem to weigh so much when she fell asleep.

Either way, it was nice being close to her, so as soon as he'd counted out the time he knew it took her to drift off, with ten extra seconds for safety, he kissed her forehead. Curvaceous slept like a log once she was properly out, but Scarf had learned from experience that if she wasn't properly asleep, she would come to with a jerk at the slightest provocation. She slept on, drooling insensately on his shoulder and he smiled briefly, the grin cut short when Albino Pirate popped up suddenly from behind a stack of barrels between them and the stairs down into the interior of the ship.

Albino Pirate had an almost magical ability to appear when you least expected him, but at least, Scarf reminded himself, the boy's timing wasn't quite so bad as it _could _have been. He hadn't seen the kiss, which was the important thing. "Hello!" Albino said, loudly but not loudly enough to wake Curvaceous, "I didn't think anyone else was up here!"

Scarf sighed. "Yes, it _is_ getting late, isn't it? We should have been in bed ages ago. I mean, obviously. Because if he'd gone to bed, Curvaceous wouldn't be sleeping on my shoulder, would he?" Hiding the fact that Curvaceous was a girl was surprisingly easy, though Scarf suspected it helped that she looked nothing at all like Cutlass Liz, who was most people's only example of a female pirate and who tended to define the whole idea of the thing. Hiding that he was in love with her was always considerably harder.

Curvaceous wanted to be treated as one of the guys and to go pirating without everyone acting weird around her because she was a girl, and helping her do it didn't feel like betraying her at all. Pretending he didn't love her did, a bit, and he couldn't seem to do anything about the feeling no matter how many times he reminded himself that it was what she wanted.

Either way, the awkwardness didn't last long, because you couldn't ever quite manage to be mad at Albino for anything, even when you wanted to, and because he clearly saw nothing suspicious at all about the way Scarf was sitting with his arm around Curvaceous's waist or the way her head was pillowed on his shoulder. As he came around the barrels toward them, his bare feet sticking palely out of the bottom of his blue pin-striped pajamas and Polly clutched affectionately to his chest, Scarf couldn't quite help feeling a rush of affection for the boy, who always gave off an air of being about 5 years old when he was tired.

"So what are you doing up?" Scarf asked gently.

Albino made a face. "The Pirate With The Accordion is snoring again."

Scarf forced himself not to laugh. Accordion usually only snored about half the time, but he'd gotten a cold recently and now he was not only snoring every time he fell asleep, he was doing it at about twice his usual volume. "Maybe it's better that Curvaceous and I didn't make it off to bed, then."

Albino nodded frantically. "He's shaking the whole cabin! It's louder than his _actual accordion_!"

Scarf opened his mouth to suggest that he wouldn't be able to hear the snoring anymore if he could just get off to sleep and that maybe he should go try again, but something about the way Albino's big red eyes were looking at him made him take pity on the lad. "Well, why don't you sit up here with us for a bit, then? It's more comfortable than it looks leaning against the wall here."

Albino's face split into a childish grin and he shuffled around the barrels, leaned against the wall, slid down it, and before Scarf could register what was happening or do a thing about it, the boy was curled up tightly against his other side, his stocking-capped head pillowed on Scarf's shoulder so that he mirrored Curvaceous almost perfectly. Polly wriggled out of Albino's grip and then snuggled into Scarf's lap, and he suddenly found himself completely trapped by the three of them. "It's definitely better out here," Albino said comfortably.

Scarf sighed, blowing upward toward his nose so that his breath ruffled his hair for a moment. "Well, that's good." A few minutes later, Albino had fallen asleep just as deeply as Curvaceous and had turned out to be an even more prodigious drooler than _she _was, and without the convenience of a large spongy beard to catch the worst of it. His shoulder was soaked through after only a few minutes, and while it was nice to be propped up in the middle so that he wouldn't fall over if he fell asleep, he was beginning to regret letting Albino stay up here with them.

Not that he actually had any right to tell the boy where to go when it wasn't on the Pirate Captain's orders. But still.

When Pirate with Gout pulled himself sleepily out of the hatch that led down to the cabin and shuffled toward them, Scarf couldn't help feeling a little embarrassed, but as he grew closer, it became perfectly clear that the man was still almost asleep. "Oh," Gout said vaguely, wobbling back and forth a bit on his feet because he'd left his crutch downstairs, "That looks cozy."

Scarf wasn't sure what to say, but apparently, it didn't matter, because after one more moment of wobbling, Gout sat down with a thump on the floor of the deck. "Think I'll stay up here. S'quiet." And then he was asleep, too, just like the rest of them, sprawled inelegantly across the deck. He rolled over a few times without waking up, but seemed to get comfortable as soon as he managed to find a pillow, resting his head against Scarf's knee and curling off to the side in front of Albino.

Scarf wasn't sure it mattered. He already hadn't been able to get up, so what was one more obstacle among friends? He sighed again, resigning himself to the fact that the others were not going to just conveniently wake up without him forcing them to (which he just didn't quite have the heart for, even though he knew he should) and leaned his head back against the wall around the ship's wheel to try to fall asleep himself.

The arrival of The Pirate Who Likes Sunsets and Kittens was almost completely unsurprising. The man had a 6th sense for adorableness (which was how they'd wound up with all of their many cats over the years) and Scarf suspected that adorable was exactly what they were now, all piled up in a heap. A bit like kittens themselves, really. Neither man said anything as Sunsets laid down on his side, facing away from Gout, and pillowed his head in Curvaceous's lap.

Scarf blushed slightly, feeling more than a little jealous of the larger man. "He doesn't mean it, though," he told himself, "He doesn't mean it at all. He doesn't mean a thing by it." And then Sunset was as deeply asleep as the rest of them and there wasn't anything he could do about it anyway. He went back to trying to fall asleep, because trying to do anything else would be useless. And after a while, he even succeeded, letting his head loll slightly to the side to rest on top of Curvaceous's blonde curls.

When The Pirate Captain found them in the morning, all snuggled up in a heap around Number 2 and Polly, he couldn't help feeling surprised. Not that Polly being in the middle of a sleeping heap of pirates was unduly surprising – the parrot was the heart and soul of the ship, but the crew wasn't always very good at fighting with each other and plenty of arguments over who got to share their hammock with her had ended up in compromise and lots of people sleeping on the floor when they couldn't be bothered with fighting it out to the end. But Number 2?

If Polly was the heart and soul of the ship, The Pirate With a Scarf was its brain. (He himself was its luscious beard and its fashion sense. Number 2 was the one who was really good at making things happen.) One _hardly_ expected the _brain _of the ship to wind up asleep in a big cuddly pile. When The Pirate With the Accordion stumbled up through the hatch and asked where everyone had gotten off to, he shushed him immediately. "Go get the camera." Accordion nodded, creeping quietly back to the cabin, only to return just as quietly with the camera in hand.

Pirate Captain took three pictures of the crew, just in case one of them didn't come out. He was _definitely_ putting this one up on the wall, if nothing else than just to remind himself that he didn't need to worry about Number 2's sometimes disconcerting distance from the rest of the crew. It was just – he was _smart_, wasn't he? Really, properly smart. Pirate Captain _himself_ was no slouch in the brainbox department, of course, but then he could still love ham and Polly and singing sea shanties together on top of the being smart. Sometimes Pirate Captain thought Pirate with a Scarf had trouble getting past the smart and really enjoying himself. Yes, this was definitely a picture for his wall.

Going back to his cabin, he put the camera away and then came back to wake the crew up, drawing a blush immediately from his second-in-command, who brushed himself off as if he were ashamed of himself, or at least as if he weren't comfortable with all this hugging and sleeping in piles and all. But the Pirate Captain knew better. He loved them all, too, didn't he? Because they were a family, weren't they? The plundering might not have been going so well lately, and they'd all be happier once Accordion got over his cold and quit moaning about his nose running all the time, but they were still a family.

He patted them all on the shoulders as he waded through the sleepy clump of crew members, taking an extra moment to ruffle Number 2's hair in spite of his protests, then took his place at the wheel. Maybe this would be the day they finally stole some booty!


End file.
